


Blow by Blow

by calrissian18



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Infidelity, Jealousy, M/M, Mpreg, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 14:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calrissian18/pseuds/calrissian18
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco is tired of fighting. He’s still not sure he knows how to stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blow by Blow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for harrydracompreg on lj.

Potter and I were never a smart match, I’d known that from the second he’d pushed me up against the wall of the Ministry and shoved his tongue down my throat. I still pushed back. We fought against and into each other and we didn’t work in the most fundamental of ways and I would have done it every day for the rest of my life if it had been an option. No one would look at us at any point in time, before, during or after a foray into a fucking and say we were going to last. It didn’t stop me falling for him. Because I only seem to know how to make bad decisions. Always have.  
  
“You can take care of it. Save it for a time when—” My mother’s hands are shaking. She draws them together, twists a ring around her finger. “It is a rarity however.”  
  
“You’ll marry him.” My father barely waits until my mother gets the last word out to cut her off. Her dark eyes flash over to him. He paces in front of the mantle. “Whoever he is, you’ll marry him and we won’t speak of this again.”  
  
I snort because there are so many things wrong with that but there’s only one that sticks out in my mind. “He doesn’t want to marry me, Daddy.” It’s not an honorific I use often but this feels like a moment in which one _would_.  
  
My father’s mouth tightens. “My grandchild will not be born a bastard.”  
  
I want to laugh but I know my father is serious, processing this the only way he knows how – the same as _his_ father had. “Will my marital status change how much you love it? We have no reputation to maintain any longer.” My mother flinches and it had felt cruel. It didn’t change that it was the truth of things.  
  
My father veers away from the Malfoy-backed argument and sits heavily on the settee across from me. I know he wants to call me stupid, and I am, or to ask what I’ve done, but we both know I can’t answer. He’s my father though, and he leans into it. “I want what’s best for you. Someone to support you, when and how you need it.” His eyes flicker over to my mother’s feet and I know, since the war, they’re not well off but they do support one another. “Your mother and I, we’re here of course, however you need us but—” And this sounds like the man I remember from my childhood.  
  
My mother clears her throat. “You need to tell the fath-the other father, Draco.”  
  
I’d known it was coming and I hardly needed my mother to tell me so. It still makes me cringe.  
  


* * *

  
Potter hated me. I had made sure of it when I left, when he ended things. I’d wanted to never have to look at him again so I went after what I knew would hurt him most, not knowing I was two weeks pregnant with his bastard kid at the time. It seemed a perfect irony that in seeking to escape him, I’d somehow got myself permanently tied to him.  
  
I see his ratty trainers enter my eye line and pause. Every manufacturer in Britain had been trying to talk him into the newest style but Potter would wear those into the ground. It was just his way.  
  
I can’t look at him. His voice is shaking. “You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve.”  
  
I want to stand but I can’t. He would look at it as intimidation. I shift on his stoop and lift my head out of my hands. “Potter—”  
  
He takes a step forward, grits his teeth. His eyes are flashing fury at me and I know I accomplished what I’d set out to. He _hates_ me. More than he ever did before. “I want to hex you,” he says and there’s a sob and a curse there. His eyes flitter away, brightening. “I _will_ hex you,” he promises. “Leave, leave now.”  
  
He’s wearing his hurt the way a Gryffindor would, all over his bloody face. Even with it, he’s still unfairly handsome. He’s got a strong jaw and an arch nose and if I were a 12-year-old witch I’d have his poster on my wall even without all that hero business.  
  
I make myself laugh coldly, pushing down anything else. “I didn’t stop by hoping you’d invite me in for a cuppa,” I say with a snort. “I have something to say to you.”  
  
Potter’s hands curl into fists. He wants to grab me, bruise my skin, shake me, I can see it in his eyes and it’s all he can do to hold himself back. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it would matter this much to him. He was the one who had made sure it wouldn’t. “I don’t want to hear it,” he snarls. He’s trembling, quaking all over and he bares his teeth. “I want to _hurt_ you,” he snarls, voice raw and aching. “It’s all I think about most days, hurting you.” He looks queasy at the admission and he sways back a step. His voice bottoms out, stretches. “Haven’t you taken enough from me? My best friend, my family, who I thought I was?” He shades his eyes with his hand. “Can’t you be done now?” And if it sounds like begging, neither of us is going to point that out.  
  
I consider leaving but I won’t let this be another thing I do wrong. I stand, show I don’t mean to stay, and the words twist out of my mouth with a frown. “I’m pregnant.”  
  
Potter falls back a step and freezes. He doesn’t even seem to breathe. His eyes go wide, disbelief and denial raging in them. He swallows and his throat clicks. “You’re sure it’s—”  
  
I want to resent the question but it’s a fair one. Even if the affair hadn’t been weeks after the conception, I had still only ever bottomed with Potter. He was the only man I’d ever trusted that much. Another bad decision there. “I’m sure.”  
  
Potter purses his lips, his eyes tracking the glint of headlights on pavement. He looks up and I can feel the fierceness of his gaze like a punch to the chest. “I hate you,” he hisses. “I hate you so fucking much.”  
  
I swallow, having expected nothing less. Something is still coiling and twisting near my heart. I nod and say, “I know,” as I pass him walking away.  
  


* * *

  
It takes him two days to show up at my flat. I think it might’ve taken longer but he’s worried I’ll do something to the parasite living in me. I wouldn’t, no matter how much I despise Potter. I’ll resent the damn thing for as long as I can because I know once it’s less of an idea and more of a _child_ , I’ll love it despite whom it keeps me tethered to.  
  
He pushes past me like he has some right to be there. He spins on his heel, his face stark and serious in my foyer. I don’t think he’s slept since I’ve told him. Brilliant self-preservation there, for an Auror. It was another thing we’d fought over, his dangerous bloody work. Of course, I hated it now more than ever. “I want a baby,” he says and it scrapes out of him. “I want to be a dad.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
He runs a hand through his hair. He looks manic from the lack of sleep. “I don’t want those things with you.”  
  
I swallow past the lump in my throat. This is not news. I refuse to be hurt by something I’ve always known. “I know that too.”  
  
Potter squares his shoulders. “I’m going to be a part of this,” he says stiffly, the jut of his chin daring me to challenge him. “You’ll move in with me.”  
  
I laugh out loud. Neither one of us could live with that. He hates me and I don’t want to be an afterthought to a child that hasn’t even been born. “Potter—”  
  
“I’m going to be there,” he says stubbornly. Of course he doesn’t want to miss a minute of this despite the fact that it would mean inviting the man who fucked around on him into his home. Poor, parentless Potter would never do anything to make his child feel like it wasn’t loved, even in utero.  
  
“You hate me,” I point out, trying to appeal to his reason – or, rather, his intense dislike of me.  
  
Potter snorts. “Yeah,” he says bleakly. Just like that. It shouldn’t leave me winded. It does. “Yeah, I do,” he says. He looks up at me, young and lost. “I’m trying not to.”  
  
It’s _that_ that makes me agree.  
  


* * *

  
Potter doesn’t look at my face. When he does cast his eyes in my direction, it’s at my still-flat stomach. He’ll stare hungrily for full minutes if I don’t tell him off for it. He’s wanted a family like nothing else and the strange thing is I want him to have it. I only wish, for his sake, it wasn’t with me.  
  
I think both of us do.  
  
He insists on accompanying me to the first check-up. I don’t want him there. Simply because I don’t want anyone anywhere. I’m two months in and I feel like I need to run to the loo to pee or retch every three seconds. That, and a nasty case of heartburn that keeps me sleeping most nights have made me even more prickly than usual.  
  
“Ready, Malfoy?”  
  
Potter swings himself into my bedroom off the doorframe. I can just barely see him from my position of hunching over the toilet. Potter’s mouth tightens and he wars with himself on the edge of the entryway before walking over to me. He silently wets a flannel and touches my shoulder to press it to my brow. Magic lashes out and breaks the mirror. I know it’s mine.  
  
Potter rears back and I can see his eyes flashing with anger.  
  
I reach out for him but I let my hand fall away before touching him. “I’m sorry, I—” My voice is _raw_. I’m _on fire_ and being touched is more than I can bear. I’ve never liked being comforted in that way when I’m sick and now it’s torture to even imagine it. “It’s too hot,” I say.  
  
Potter’s jaw is clenched but he nods tightly. He doesn’t believe me. I find that in the moment, I really couldn’t care less.  
  
It’s another fifteen minutes before I can pull myself up. It takes three Cooling Charms – that Potter has to cast, my magic is too unpredictable because of this damn parasite – before I can stomach the thought of clothes. We’re still a few minutes early to the appointment. Weasley is waiting out in the hallway, looking tense. Potter sees him before I do. He stops mid-step before steeling himself and breezing past Weasley as though he’s a blank stretch of wall.  
  
Potter hasn’t spoken to him since he caught us post-coital in Weasley’s bedroom. Weasley hasn’t spoken to _me_ since either. Though this has much less effect than Potter’s radio silence, we never spoke before. We didn’t really speak the night we fucked. He and Granger had only been split up for two weeks at that point and Weasley had been pissed and heartbroken and I had wanted to hurt Potter.  
  
Weasley glares at me as I pass. Truthfully, I feel worse for what I’ve done to him than Potter. He hadn’t been in his right mind and I’d seduced him, used him without thinking of what it would do to _him_.  
  
“Hermione told me,” Weasley calls to Potter’s back. It immediately knots in about sixteen different places.  
  
He whirls on Weasley, teeth gritted. He hisses, “It isn’t _yours_.” His fist clenches like he means to use it.  
  
Weasley backs away, hands raised. “I never thought it was. I—we—” Neither one of us can bring ourselves to say Weasley was the one to bottom. Neither one of us wants to make the image of me cheating on Potter any clearer. I might have wanted to, once upon a time, but I’m trying not to keep punishing him for the sake of the thing growing inside me. “I’m here because...” he swallows, “because you’re having a baby. You’re my best mate and you’re having a baby.”  
  
“I’m _not_ your best mate. Not anymore,” Potter gets out, his voice hard and Weasley looks like he’s been cursed.  
  
Shame is trying to eat me alive and I can’t stand there any longer. I’m nearly to the end of the hall when our exam room door opens and Healer Fellows pokes her head out. She smiles at me and waves me inside when she spots me. Potter joins us after only a moment, face red.  
  
It’s a boy. We listen to the heartbeat and watch the projection of it. Potter looks entranced. I find it annoying and repetitive.  
  
Fellows gives us a moment alone as she writes it all down in my chart. Potter’s still staring at the flickering image of the monstrosity in my stomach like it’s a damn work of art. It looks a bit alien to me but I can tell Potter loves it already. I watch the awe in his face deepen.  
  
I squint and my thoughts pop out of my mouth without my consent. I blame it on the larvae. “If you’re trying to choose which one of us to forgive, pick him.”  
  
Potter huffs out a laugh. He doesn’t stop looking at the spell’s projection of the tiny goblin in my stomach. “Who says it’s an either/or?” he asks, a dead amusement in his eyes. He shrugs. “Maybe I can’t forgive either of you.”  
  
“Forgive him,” I say. Weasley didn’t set out to hurt him, Weasley didn’t want out of the bond they had. I did. “I’m the bastard who cheated. He’s your family. Sooner or later, you’ll forgive him. You should do it now, when you need him, when you need your family around you.”  
  
Potter’s eyes finally pull away and focus on me. He looks at me like he’s never seen me before. I don’t know what to make of it.  
  


* * *

  
Potter’s life is separate from mine. We live together but we don’t take meals together, I sleep at odd intervals and wherever I can and he works anywhere from 12-18 hours a day. I’m finally beginning to understand why he’s asked me to live with him. I don’t think we would ever see each other if we didn’t. We hardly do now.  
  
It’s the middle of the night – time is irrelevant to me as it’s stopped dictating when I sleep – when I hear a commotion in the living room. I think about going to check it out but I’m sitting on the kitchen counter and it had taken me three attempts to get up there. I’m wrist-deep in saltines as well.  
  
Potter stumbles into the room and I can smell the Firewhisky stink on him from across the room. It makes my stomach roll. I pull a face. “You smell like you’ve been swimming in alcohol.”  
  
Potter’s bright eyes focus on me. He snorts and runs a hand through his hair, leaning heavily against the doorframe. “You’re not the bloke, Malfoy. If I had a Mom and Dad, I don’t but if I did,” he laughs, “you would _not be_ the bloke I took home to meet them. You are not that guy.” I’ve just started to put on weight. Only a few pounds and I don’t know what I’m meant to do with this. Whether I’m _the guy_ or not, I’m having his fucking goblin-child.  
  
Potter’s stare is unnerving. “You’re the guy in the leather jacket, the one you meet before the guy you marry. The guy every single one of your friends warns you about. They tell you he’ll break your heart and you fall for him anyway. You’re that guy but you’re not _the_ guy.”  
  
I stare right back at him. He’s a fucking liar if nothing else. He never fell for me and he can’t guilt me into feeling like I’m the only one who did wrong. “Go take a shower, you’re making me want to puke,” I tell him.  
  
Potter doesn’t move. His eyes flick to the side and he licks his lips. He stares at me again. “Why Ron?” And he tries to say it like he doesn’t care for the answer but it’s all that’s there in the words, how intensely he _cares_.  
  
And that’s whom he was with of course. He was out with Weasley, staring at the man I’d fucked because I didn’t want to fuck him. It explains all of this. Why he’s trying to marginalize me because that’s the way he’s felt all night. It doesn’t mean I forgive him. “Because he wasn’t you,” I say, slipping down off the counter and pushing past him.  
  


* * *

  
I wake up abruptly to find Weasley leaning over me. “Shit,” I swear.  
  
Weasley backs up a bit, grinning. He’s such a petty arsehole. He sits down on the edge of my bed, next to my hip and I have no idea what he might be doing there. He squints and shifts over me, placing his palm on the other side of my chest so I’m caged between his hands. “I heard you,” he says, looking suspicious. “Pushing Harry to forgive me.”  
  
It should surprise me that he hadn’t left. That he’d stood outside the exam room door while Harry hated him from the other side of it. It doesn’t. Weasley got it wrong sometimes, but he was a loyal friend to Potter.  
  
I sit up and my back twinges. “He needs you,” I say.  
  
Weasley sways back as I move up. “I remember you didn’t care much about what he needed only a few months ago.”  
  
I’m staring at Weasley’s chest. It’s freckled but muscular and I can remember the panting rise and fall of it as I’d fucked into him. Weasley had given the best reactions, a virgin always did, and I lick my lips. It’s displaced horniness. I’d been staring at Potter like he was flummery pudding for the past month. I think he knew it too, the way he always got skittish when I was near and _suddenly_ had to rush off somewhere.  
  
Weasley coughs, like he knows what I’m thinking of and he pulls away back to the edge of the bed. He looks uncomfortable. “Why’d you do it?” he asks.  
  
I huff out a laugh. It’s such a Gryffindor question really. “Does it matter?”  
  
Weasley shrugs but I can tell the nonchalance is feigned. “You worked pretty fucking hard to get me into bed.”  
  
I perk a brow at him. “Not that hard.”  
  
The tips of Weasley’s ears go red. “I was bloody heartbroken, what’s your excuse?”  
  
I stare down at the bump in my belly. It’s respectable now, five months gone. I feel a flutter skim the surface. The goblin is saying hello. I swallow. “So was I.”  
  
Weasley reaches out with his hand but stops short of placing it on me. “Can I?” he says, eyes beyond eager.  
  
I nod shortly.  
  
Weasley’s hand smooths over my stomach and I can feel tears welling up. Potter hasn’t done the same. He can’t touch me. I understand it but. I push down every emotion as Weasley grins back at me. “It’s moving,” he says giddily.  
  
I roll my eyes. “Brilliant, you are. Why aren’t you an Auror again, with deductive skills like those...”  
  
Weasley sobers a bit and climbs over me. He sits back against the headboard so our shoulders touch and puts his hand back on my stomach. “Got any weird cravings yet?”  
  
I blink over at him. “What are you doing, Weasley?”  
  
Weasley exhales in a full-bodied sigh like he’s making an impossible choice and he says, “You need me more than he does. Harry has friends. You don’t.”  
  
And it’s true, I don’t. I haven’t for years. Blaise lives in Greece and we Owl every once in awhile but it’s not what it was. Pansy doesn’t speak to anyone from school, I think after seventh year she’d wanted to wipe the slate clean. I don’t entirely blame her. Theo and I had never picked up the aborted friendship we’d had when we were children. We were friendly when we met each other out in society but it was all superficial. Goyle was in Azkaban. I’d only visited him twice. Queenie and I had never been more than acquaintances. We’d only spent time together because she was mates with Pansy. And that exhausted my list of close friends who had never really been that close. I hadn’t told any of them about the pregnancy.  
  
I would have told Severus. If he’d been alive to chastise me for being an idiot. My parents are the only people aside from Potter I have to talk to about this.  
  
I sneer over at Weasley. “And you think you’re the best option for that?”  
  
Weasley pulls his hand away from the active goblin kicking at my stomach and gives off an exasperated huff. “Malfoy, when there’s only one bloke offering, you try not to insult him,” he says, drawing out the sarcasm. He kicks me in the shin and says, “You suck at this.”  
  
I do. I always have. I shrug to hide my discomfiture. “Habit. I’m... new to it is all.”  
  
Weasley nudges me with his elbow. “I’m biting my tongue too so you can try a bit harder.”  
  
He’s got me there.  
  
Potter finds us in my bedroom. I’d fallen asleep with my head on Weasley’s bony shoulder and he’d put an arm around me to keep me upright. The last I remember, I’d been trying to talk him into getting me kippers in custard and he’d been refusing for mental health reasons. Weasley jerks upright and it makes my head slip down onto his chest. I feel his arm tense around me and then Potter’s _wrecked_ voice penetrates the sleep-haze in my brain. “You’ve _got_ to be taking the piss,” he says, disbelieving and jagged. He’s close to some strange, ruthless laughter.  
  
I can hear Weasley’s heartbeat pick up beneath my ear. If he knows I’m awake, he doesn’t give me away. “He needs someone,” Weasley says with false bravado. His chest puffs out a bit. “He needs someone and you’re not stepping up.” Potter scoffs but Weasley doesn’t let him interrupt. “I get that you’re hurt, Harry, and I can understand it and empathize with it and I feel guilty as hell over it but he’s the father of your child and you’re not stepping up.”  
  
If it sounds like a denouncement, it’s because it is.  
  
Potter doesn’t speak for a long moment and eventually I hear the stomp of his footsteps fade away down the hallway.  
  
I don’t open my eyes and my voice is helpfully muffled by Weasley’s robes when I say, “You didn’t have to do that.”  
  
Weasley snorts and rests his chin on my hair, tightening his arm around me. “It’s called having a friend, Malfoy. I know you don’t recognize it.” He turns so the flat of his cheek is on top of my head. “It means I’m in your corner.”  
  
I scowl to stop my emotions going haywire. The goblin kicks up a ruckus in my belly. “If I do something stupid like tear up or go all weepy, it has nothing to do with you. I’m hormonal and prone to... fits. I find you gross, understood?”  
  
I can feel Weasley’s cheek fill out with his grin. “Understood.”  
  


* * *

  
Weasley throws a Gobstone at me. My magic reaches out and holds it at an invisible barrier. I hadn’t meant to do that. Weasley all but pouts. “That’s fucking unfair.”  
  
“The goblin doesn’t want his incubator any less pretty than he is now.” I poke my stomach. “Thank you, monster man.”  
  
Weasley snorts and Granger leans into him slightly, her eyes lighting up watching him. They’re sickeningly in love with one another and our friendship makes no sense. I’d assumed Granger must hate me for fucking her ex. And she admitted she had for a while there but she was the one that had ended things with Weasley and it’d felt hypocritical to her to hold a grudge.  
  
She’d been afraid of what he felt for her, how real and how fierce it was. I understood it and I was probably one of the people who could, which was the foundation of our whole friendship. Having anyone look at you like you’re the center of their universe is scary as scary gets.  
  
Weasley told me, after he’d gone out drinking with Potter, that even more truthfully she’d been a bit turned on by the idea of him bottoming. I was still trying to scrub that knowledge from my brain.  
  
Potter walks in the door and his eyes widen as he takes in the sight of the three of us half-heartedly playing Gobstones on the floor of his living room. His hand tightens and loosens around the strap of his attaché. He wants to say something, I can feel it, but he stalks off without giving in to the impulse.  
  


* * *

  
I can’t sleep. I waddle down to the kitchen because my stomach is trying to tip me over a little more every day. My back is an agony of aches and pains. The only thing I’ve wanted to eat the past three days is carrots and vinegar and the kitchen chairs are the most uncomfortable monstrosities I’ve ever had the misfortune of sitting in. I turn around from rummaging in the fridge to find one of them has been Charmed into a pouf.  
  
I look down approvingly at my midsection. “Thank you, goblin,” I tell it cordially. We’re on civil terms these days. He tries not to sit too much on my bladder and I try not to disparage his entire existence.  
  
I hear a whooshing noise from the next room. It’s gone midnight and Potter’s only now coming home. I struggle up from my seat to see him tumbling out of the Floo. He’s got a man attached to his face. Their hands are pulling at clothes and they’re kissing sloppily and after a full few minutes, Potter opens his eyes and stares straight at me with viciousness in his gaze.  
  
This is for me then. To hurt me. For stealing his friends, for getting up the duff, for still wanting him and not being secretive about it, for making him live with a man he can barely stand to look at. It hurts more that one day it won’t be. One day there will be someone else and I won’t enter his head once while he’s with them.  
  
He can’t forgive me, I realize all at once. As much as he’s trying to make this work, and admittedly it’s not as much as he could, but undoubtedly more than I deserve, he _can’t_ forgive me. I start packing my things that night.  
  


* * *

  
He comes down the stairs for his coffee, a bruise of deepest purple on his neck. I look away. I’ve made sure we would both be here at this time so I could tell him, not so he could parade this in front of me. Because, yes, I’m still in love with him and I so did not need the visceral reminder. I don’t know what hurts worse, that I’m not over him or that he knows it and is poking at it.  
  
The goblin in my stomach kicks hard and I gasp over it. Potter takes a step towards me, brow furrowed in concern as I curl over myself. I ignore it. “I’m moving out,” I tell him.  
  
For all of a moment, he looks stricken. Then his face twists into a mask of anger and hate. “Because I’m not sitting around celibate, you get to take my kid away?”  
  
I stare down at my hands where they rest on the crest of my stomach. I want to hate the thing inside me. I want to hate it for keeping me here, for putting me in the position to have my heart crushed beneath Potter’s heel a second time. I can’t. My eyes flicker up to Potter’s. “Tell me last night wasn’t to punish me.” And I want him to say it wasn’t because it means I might be able to stay, even if it will kill me to know he’s moved on. He purses his lips and I push. “To hurt me the way I’ve hurt you.”  
  
He looks away. It’s as I expected.  
  
I huff out a laugh that shreds through my chest. “We can’t raise a child, Potter,” I say weakly. “We’re poison together.”  
  
Potter’s eyes get shinier and he gets more vicious to make up for it. “So I forgive you or I don’t get to see my baby. Seems a bit convenient for you, doesn’t it?” It’s a slice in my chest to know he thinks I’m holding our child hostage so he’ll play nice. He really thinks nothing of me.  
  
I sigh and it feels like it takes everything out of me. “You’ll always be a part of the goblin’s life.”  
  
“Don’t call him that,” Potter growls.  
  
“It’s my body he’s growing inside, I’ll call him whatever I like,” I snap and I’m losing the thread of the argument. I refuse to get riled. I’m not trying to get at Potter by leaving. For once, I’m _not_ trying to get at Potter. “You don’t get me,” I tell him simply. “I know you’ve stopped even _seeing_ me in the wake of all this, but I swear to you I’m not taking anything you want away from you.”  
  
I move to lever myself out of my seat but the power in Potter’s gaze stops me. “Of course I want you!” Potter explodes. “You got your leg over with my best fucking mate and I still want you.” He runs a hand through his hair and laughs and he sounds half-mad. “I _hate_ that I want you but I do.”  
  
I don’t understand what he hopes to get out of lying to me this way. Does he think I’ll stay, give him free access to the baby, because he lies about loving me? I snort to myself. “You can’t need me that badly.”  
  
Potter shakes his head, confused. “What are you talking about?”  
  
I glare at him, exasperated. My hand smooths over the arch of my stomach and the flutter is back. “I know, Potter. I know you never wanted me to begin with.”  
  
Potter has the audacity to look offended by the suggestion. “Of course I—Wha—”  
  
“I was a means to an end.” I can still remember when the idea of _us_ was shattered for me, clear as bloody day.  
  
Potter had dragged me to his idiot office Christmas party where everyone looked at me like I was a Death Eater or worse. I’d closed myself off in an empty storeroom in an effort to keep my temper under control. I’d nearly hexed that Barnes fellow twice.  
  
It wasn’t long before Potter’s boss – Head Auror Robards – was talking jovially to Minister Shacklebolt just outside it. ‘—fought like hell against the assignment,’ Robards was saying to him, ‘stringing along a Malfoy. Didn’t think he’d ever get his reputation back, I didn’t, but Malfoy’s got connections to men you wouldn’t otherwise meet, men who could lead ‘im to the real criminals. We’ve already made half-dozen arrests and looks like Potter’s even talked him in bed now so at least it’s not all that repellant to him any longer. Boy deserves an Order of Merlin, maybe even Second Class for it, thought I’d make the pitch.’  
  
I’d waited until they’d moved away from the door to storm out of it and Potter was there in an instant, sliding an arm around my waist, nipping my earlobe, saying, “I was wondering where you’d gone off to.” He walked me backwards, right back to where I was. “I think I could use a breather too.” His eyes had been gleeful and his smile had taken my breath away and I realized just because he’d never loved me, it didn’t mean I wasn’t in love with him.  
  
I let him blow me in that storeroom where the bottom fell out of my world before Apparating us home so he could fuck me in his bed. I tried to leave but I couldn’t. He’d show up and smile and it was all so real until I remembered it wasn’t. I fucked Weasley and made sure he would catch us so I could finally get away from the lie in his eyes.  
  
“You weren’t—”  
  
“I was an _assignment_ ,” I spat. Potter’s mouth gapes. “I overheard Robards going on about it at the Christmas party. Don’t pretend I was anything to you, not when we both know the truth.”  
  
Something shatters in Potter and it’s a moment before he can rally himself. He shakes his head wildly. “It wasn’t like that.” His voice is breathy.  
  
I laugh. “Yes, it was.”  
  
Potter falls back against the counter, his coffee brewed but forgot. He presses a palm to his forehead, his eyes flying back and forth over midair. “You had sex with Ron on New Year’s,” he says, something dawning on his face.  
  
My mouth twists and I look away from him. “Even after knowing it wasn’t real for you, that I’d spent a year deluding myself into thinking...” I stop because I won’t admit that, not out loud. Even without everything else, we still only acted as if it was sex and nothing more – before I learned it wasn’t even that. “I still couldn’t walk away from you. I needed you to be the one to—” I stop and swallow. “And I picked Ron because I knew it would hurt most.”  
  
Pain and forgiveness blooms in his eyes. “You’re wrong,” he says weakly. He licks his lower lip. “It was real for me.”  
  
I shake my head and my eyes are wide, a sheen filtering over them. I look up at him, begging him without words to just _stop_. I don’t want to hear any of it anymore. “You don’t have to—I’m going to have this baby and you’re still going to be its father. I won’t take that from you but I can’t stay here. I can hardly stand to look at you and now you—” I lick my lips, unable to bring myself to mention the man from the night before. The man who’s left his claim on Potter far better than I ever did. “I know I deserve to be punished for what I’ve done but I’m not strong enough to take it.” I hate the way my voice breaks over it, I hate that I’m _not_ strong enough.  
  
Potter gets halfway to me and says, “Draco—”  
  
And that hurts the most. I was never _Draco_. Never. I was Malfoy, a criminal, a Death Eater, a decent fuck. I close my eyes and struggle out of my seat. I’m seven months in and it completely winds me. I pant and step away from Potter, whose hands are stretched out like he wants to help but isn’t sure he’s allowed. He isn’t.  
  
“I’ll be staying with Weasley for a while,” I puff out. I’d Flooed him the night before. Granger had joined him, half-dressed, to frown at me out of the flames.  
  
Potter looks wrong-footed. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth and bites. “Oh,” he breathes out. “You and he—” And he knows better than that, truly, he’d nearly been the most ecstatic about Granger and Weasley getting back together, but reason seems to have flown out of his head.  
  
I roll my eyes. “No, we’re... friends, I guess.” It still sounds strange to say. Salazar, it’s strange to think. “He’s turned out to be a pretty great one,” I tell him graciously. “Thank you, for sharing him with me.”  
  
And, like that, there’s nothing left between us. No more to say. I know the truth now and so does he. Maybe we won’t ruin this child with our own fucked-up history.  
  


* * *

  
Weasley and Granger spend the next month trying to push me back towards Potter. I don’t tell them about what I’d overheard, about what had made me turn to Weasley. It’s an embarrassment I could barely suffer through once. It does make me sure that when they tell me he loves me, they’re just as full of it as he is.  
  
He drops by, goes to the appointments with Granger and I, and we’re civil but it’s superficial. All of it. We were all wrong for each other from the start. I try to hold onto that. We made each other miserable. I’d told Weasley this when he wouldn’t leave it alone and he’d laughed and said, ‘Newsflash, Malfoy, that’s what love _is_.’  
  
It’s two in the morning when I hear Weasley’s Floo flare to life. I frown and walk into the next room, balancing the tub of ice cream on my stomach, to see Potter brushing ash off his robes. He looks like he’s been caught out when he sees me. “Uh, I know it’s late,” he says nervously. He steps closer to me. “I, uh, I couldn’t sleep.”  
  
I indicate the tub of ice cream with my spoon. “Neither could I.” I have no idea what he’s doing here.  
  
He shuffles towards me. “I was laying awake and I was thinking I’ve never felt the baby kick. I wanted to but I was never sure I—” He licks his lip and says, “I’ve never felt the baby kick.”  
  
My lips curve into a smile against my will. It’s why I can’t sleep. Kid’s clearly a Keeper, he’s been kicking at my kidneys like they’re Quaffles. “Goblin’s kicking now.”  
  
Potter frowns and steps near enough to put his hands on me. “Ron says it’s a term of endearment.”  
  
It takes me a second to suss out what Potter’s talking about. “‘Goblin’?” He nods. “Of course it is. He’s a right little goblin,” I say fondly. I catch the furrow of Potter’s brow with shock. “You thought it was, what? An insult?”  
  
“What was I supposed to think?”  
  
I bristle. “You’re the one who made it abundantly clear you didn’t want to do this with me.”  
  
Potter looks abashed, his face crumpling in, and he says, “I did. I just. I wanted to do it with a you who hadn’t fucked my best mate. I wanted to do it with a you who wanted me too.”  
  
I can’t look at him. My voice drops but I still drag out, “You got what you wanted then.”  
  
Potter’s hand slides over my swollen stomach and the touch is like a balm and the goblin’s kicks immediately lessen in intensity. I’m staring down at where his hand is curving over my belly. Potter moves the ice cream tub out from in between us and places it on the mantle. He’s trying to catch my gaze but I’m lost in the look of his hands on me.  
  
He catches my chin between his thumb and forefinger and pulls it up until I’m looking at him. “Do you know when it became real for me?” he asks me.  
  
I swallow. I don’t care. I don’t want to know. All I know is it wasn’t real for him when it mattered. “Potter—” I start.  
  
“Twenty minutes into our first date,” he says and he grins at me, hesitant but gaining in certainty. “You kicked me in the shin and said I was just as boring as you’d always expected,” Potter had been staring down at the tablecloth up till then, swallowing convulsively, and I’d wanted to bite his jaw despite his being the worst date I’d ever been on. I’d wanted his attention because apparently we were right back in school, “that it was only the constant life or death situations that had made me seem interesting and now that those were done I was as dull as a Flobberworm. All I could focus on was the shine on your lips as you said it.” He huffs out a laugh. “Because you licked them, right before you said the word ‘dull,’ you licked them and all I could think about was kissing you.”  
  
I could remember him looking up at me with wide emerald eyes and a blush staining his cheeks. I’d thought he was angry at the time.  
  
Potter’s gaze flits down to my lips now. “There are no reasons we should work.” He coughs and looks away. “I can’t give you any of the standard list for why I’m mad about you – that you’re smart, funny, beautiful, why there _isn’t_ anyone else because everything says there should be.”  
  
He shrugs his shoulders and admits, “You are smart - more clever, really - but that doesn’t make me love you, it makes me nervous. I never know what you’re thinking and it scares the hell out of me because you’re _smart_ so it could be anything. You’re funny, but not to me. Your humor’s too honest and blunt and it pins me a bit too often. You’re beautiful but not in a way I can appreciate. You’re too sharp and impossible to hold onto.” He holds my gaze as he says clearly, “I don’t know why I love you. I can’t tell you and I wish I could because then I would know why when I’m not with you, you’re all I can think about and why when I am with you, you’re all I can think about.”  
  
I don’t know what to say to him. Because I don’t know why I love him either. Everything I should love about him – that he’s self-sacrificing, that he’s brave, that he’s kind – are all things I hate about him. It led him to become an Auror, a job I despise if only because the men who wear those robes had taken everything from me. That’s without the constant danger it rains down on his head. He’s brave to a fault, which means he’s stupid to a fault because he has zero forward-thinking ability. He’s also so kind I rarely know if I can believe it, which makes me feel damaged and paranoid.  
  
I hate him and I can’t live without him.  
  
Potter leans into me, his breath against my neck as he noses in under my earlobe. “I miss you. I still stand outside your door to watch you sleep.” He snorts. “Only you aren’t there.”  
  
I gasp at the admission and I can feel him smile against my skin. His tongue darts out and traces a vein in my neck. “I can stare at the flutter of the pulse in your throat for hours and still find it enthralling.”  
  
I remember his face when he’d seen the projection of our goblin for the first time and I believe it.  
  
“I Flooed you,” he says, low and throaty. “Six times. The night after you slept with Ron.” I’d been at the Manor. “The only person I wanted to be with, feeling so low, was you. I love you and I’m done hurting you back if you can be too.”  
  
He curls his fingers around mine, his thumb brushing over my knuckles, and our entwined hands resting on the jut of my stomach. I’m done. I am. I tell him so.


End file.
